Editions

Neurosis and the human condition

Despair and realization

Neurosis is not characteristic of the human condition, it is a relational datum, that is, it stems from the attitudes that the human being or the individual establishes with himself, with the other, the others, and the world – his/her relational contexts. Believing that neurosis - perceptual distortion or difficulty of adaptation - is part of the individual is psychoanalytic determinism; it is the idea that innate and unconscious traumas and biological characteristics determine our activities.

The human being is a possibility of relationship with biological needs to be met. It is born free and limited. Possibilities of exercising motivations are its characteristics, as much as they are established by its relational contexts, understood as family, society, and culture.

One is born free to be what one is: a being in relation to others and to the world, with a structuring nature towards others, their desires, fears, and commitments, situated and established in societies, in times, creating realizations, as well as contradictions. I remember here Kafka’s Prometheus:

«There are four legends about Prometheus:

»According to the first, he was chained to a rock in the Caucasus for having betrayed the gods by telling their secrets to men, and the gods sent eagles that ate pieces of his liver, though it always recovered.

»According to the second, Prometheus, tormented by the pain of bird pecks, pressed himself deeper and deeper into the rock until he became one with it.

»According to the third, his betrayal was forgotten over the course of thousands of years; the gods have forgotten, the eagles have forgotten, he himself has forgotten.

» According to the fourth, the event became irrelevant. The gods grew tired, the eagles grew tired, the weary wound closed.

»The rock remains unexplained. The legend tries to explain the unexplainable. As it arises from a background of truth, it must end again unexplained».

In the dynamics of life, contradictions and encounters create limits that are accepted or not. When they are denied, no acceptance of reality begins to be structured, no acceptance of what exists, and in this way signs of omission (fear) and refusal are established, as well as positions and choices determined by these relational contingencies. These positions create divisions responsible for convergent or divergent polarizations created by autoreferenced settings, in which individuals position themselves, perceive themselves as the beginning and end of processes. For those people, everything depends on them, is created by them or turned to them. This positioning creates distortions, transforms the other into an object that reflects and refracts; the individual distorts reality and thus shapes what is known as neurosis. This perceptive distortion creates victims, oppressors, in addition to prejudiced, rabid, fearful, needy people. In short, it establishes the referents of neurosis responsible for conflicts, violence, lack - relational difficulties.

Neurotic is the individual who isolates himself from the relational processes, who restrains and separates himself/herself from the other, from the world, from reality, thus exercising his/her role as victim, or oppressor and oppressed, exposing his/her emptiness and despair.

Vera Felicidade de Almeida Campos is a Brazilian psychologist, graduated from Universidade Federal do Rio de Janeiro - UFRJ. She has been working in psychotherapy since the late sixties and is considered an authority on Gestalt in Brazil.